In Where Histories Reside Priya Jaikumar examines eight decades of films shot on location in India to show how attending to filmed space reveals alternative timelines and histories of cinema. In this bold “spatial” film historiography, Jaikumar outlines factors that shape India's filmed space, from state bureaucracies and commercial infrastructures to aesthetic styles and neoliberal policies. Whether discussing how educational shorts from Britain and India transform natural landscapes into instructional lessons or how Jean Renoir’s The River (1951) presents a universal human condition through the particularities of place, Jaikumar demonstrates that the history of filming a location has always been a history of competing assumptions, experiences, practices, and representational regimes. In so doing, she reveals that addressing the persistent question of “what is cinema?” must account for an aesthetics and politics of space.

"Employing a variety of methodologies, the volume is valuable both in itself and as a model for subaltern cinema history and historiography." - Choice

"Written with style and verve, [Where Histories Reside] is one of those rare academic works that can justifiably claim a readership beyond conventional disciplinary provinces like film history or theory." - Critical Quarterly

"“Where Histories Reside is a great resource.... It is an authoritative book with meticulous research.... [I] recommend it to those who are interested in how space, history, geography, and people have come to create the cinematic space.”" - Quarterly Review of Film and Video

"“Where Histories Reside might be a book of multiple localised legacies concerning regional geography, Empire and globalised networks of capital and film production, but it is also very much a publication brimming with hard-won personal insight and critical reflection.”" - BioScope

"“Where Histories Reside shows that space is not a thing to be filmed, nor simply a place to film in.... Jaikumar’s book invites us to regard both national and cinematic space as overdetermined and also to consider that seeing filmed space requires multiple overlapping lenses.”" - Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

"“Beginning with a promise of realizing a spatial critique in film studies, this book contributes to the spatial turn in film studies.... The significant success of the book is in gesturing towards diverse methods which go beyond the textual, enter the world of commerce, labour and interlink the on screen with off screen.”" - Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television